The Friendship That Changed International Religious Freedom for America and the World 

In 1981, two men entered Congress who would over time become the chief architects of modern U.S. religious freedom policy. But the story really begins a few years later.  

In 1985, Congressmen Frank Wolf (VA-10) and Chris Smith (NJ-4) sealed a lifelong friendship that transformed the way America and the world engage religious freedom. On the basis of this remarkable legacy, they will be the joint recipients of this year’s Defender of Religious Freedom award presented by the Religious Freedom Institute. 

How It Began 

The friendship began in Bucharest, Romania, where Wolf and Smith met with victims of the brutal Communist despot Nicolae Ceauşescu, who routinely silenced or eliminated people of faith.  

During their visit, terrified and desperate Romanians told the congressmen their stories of torture and rape, and dared to give them crumpled notes identifying family members who were also jailed for their faith. Profoundly moved and angered, Wolf publicly called the Ceauşescu regime “darker and more evil” than any on earth. Smith would later tell the story by reflecting on the book Tortured for Christ. Written by Romanian pastor Richard Wurmbrand, the memoir chronicled the unspeakable physical torture and psychological abuse of underground Christians under Ceauşescu, including Pastor Wurmbrand and his wife Sabinat. “I was moved to tears when I read it,” Smith recalled, “and challenged to act.” 

Two “Lions of Religious Freedom” 

Smith and Wolf are devout Christians whose understanding of God’s love obligates them to defend religious freedom for all. Neither hesitates to ground his public acts in religious convictions, traits often seen these days as politically unwise and even unconstitutional.  

One opponent of Congressman Smith ran a campaign ad mocking him as politically timid and naïve, ostensibly like the character played by Jimmy Stewart in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Anyone who has observed Chris Smith in action recognizes the absurdity of such a claim. His principles are so deeply rooted that he insists on telling the truth as he understands it, even when doing so might lose votes for him or for his party or might threaten his safety. He is well known (and either admired or reviled) for his unyielding defense of the defenseless, from the innocent child in the womb to the sick, aged, and dying, as well as the violently persecuted.  

Over the course of his thirty-four years in the House of Representatives (1981–2015), Wolf’s devotion to the sacredness of the religious conscience led his colleagues, his constituents, and religious freedom supporters to label him “the conscience of the Congress.” Wolf became a towering figure in integrating religious liberty into modern U.S. foreign policy. Like his friend, he was and is eager to defend his moral and religious convictions and their implications for his policy views, undeterred by the political costs or threats that may result. 

The bottom line is: Smith and Wolf are fierce, so much so that my colleague has quite fittingly called them “two lions of religious freedom.” 

Congressman Smith: A Brief History 

In his home state of New Jersey, Smith is universally respected. He is serving his 23rd consecutive term and his 46th year in the U.S. House of Representatives. He is the longest-serving congressman in New Jersey history, and is today tied for the honor of longest-serving current member of the House.  

Among Smith’s greatest legacies will be his relentless, forty-six-year quest to protect religious freedom at home and to fight for it abroad. His guiding principles in public life are expressed in the Declaration of Independence: God creates every human being to be equal and gives each certain rights that must never be removed by anyone, especially governments. The first of those rights is the freedom to “exercise” religion. According to Smith and the Founders, that right belongs to everyone. 

In the United States, he has defended the Founders’ understanding of free exercise against those who would degrade it. For example, he played a key role in ensuring that the 1993 Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) would not provide a religious freedom defense for abortions. 

In foreign policy, Smith has applied the Founders’ vision on behalf of religious believers around the world by relentlessly drawing attention to their brutal treatment by political despots, theocratic regimes, and terrorists. In his own words: “Billions of human beings, made in the image of God, live in countries where their God-given right to freely exercise their religion is restricted—many to the point of incarceration, torture, and execution.” 

Three examples will help tell the Chris Smith story.  

During a trip to Nigeria, the home of the terrorist group Boko Haram, Smith met an evangelical Christian named Habila Adamu. Ordered to renounce his faith with an AK-47 pressed to his face, Adamu was asked: “Are you ready to die as a Christian?” Adamu said yes, he was ready to die as a Christian. In Smith’s words: “A bullet ripped through Habila’s face. He crumpled to the ground, left for dead. By some miracle, he survived.” Smith asked Adamu to come to Washington and tell his story at a congressional hearing. Adamu told the committee and the world: “I am alive because God wants you to have this message—knowing Christ is so much deeper than merely knowing Boko Haram’s story of hate and intolerance.” 

Smith has also visited China on several memorable occasions and has brought many persecuted believers to the United States to testify. In 1994, Smith met with Chinese Catholic Bishop Su Zhimin. The bishop described being beaten, starved, and imprisoned for decades because of his faith. Again, in Smith’s words: “And yet, despite his immense suffering, Bishop Su prayed for China’s leaders and those who persecuted him. He prayed not just for the persecuted church, but for the conversion of those who hate, torture, and kill … Love those who hate you, as Christ did from the cross.”  

Not long after this meeting, Bishop Su was arrested and has been under house arrest since. If he is still alive under the supervision of brutal Chinese officials, he is ninety-four years old. 

Other Chinese victims have made it to the United States and have told their stories in public hearings convened by Chairman Smith. I was honored to testify at one of those hearings, which was co-chaired by Senator Marco Rubio. Like the rest of the world, I heard the terrifying story of a twenty-nine-year-old Uyghur Muslim woman named Mihrigul Tursun, who had survived eleven months of torture in a Chinese concentration camp. It was difficult to hear her emotional description of what she had experienced: the death of one of her three babies in the camp; her incarceration in a cell with sixty women where rotating groups of fifteen would stand for two hours while others tried to sleep; forced drugs that caused extreme bleeding or death; torture in a “tiger chair” where she was strapped in and subjected to repeated electric shocks. Ms. Tursun and the other prisoners were forced to sing songs hailing President Xi Jinping and the Communist Party, and to repeat: “Leniency for those who ‘repent’ and punishment for those who resist.”  

Smith wanted America and Xi Jinping to hear this. In his own words: “Ms. Tursun’s powerful testimony reminds us that we cannot be silent when the Chinese government is constructing a high-tech police state … whose goal is the forced assimilation of an entire ethnic minority population.” He and Senator Rubio later introduced the Uyghur Human Rights Policy Act, which places sanctions on Chinese officials and businesses complicit in what both rightly called “crimes against humanity.” 

That was but one of dozens of religious freedom bills that Congressman Smith has introduced and sponsored. Others include the Nigeria Religious Freedom and Accountability Act, which pushed a resisting Department of State to designate Nigeria as a “Country of Particular Concern” under the 1998 International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA). 

Congressman Wolf: A Brief History 

In 2011, Frank Wolf wrote a book entitled Prisoner of Conscience: One Man’s Crusade for Global Human and Religious Rights. In his introduction, Chuck Colson calls Wolf “a modern-day William Wilberforce,” referring to the member of the British Parliament who in the nineteenth century persuaded his government to end the slave trade in the British empire. 

In the book, Wolf argues that human slavery survives today among the worst of the religious persecutors, especially Sudan and China. After his retirement from Congress in 2015, Wolf added ISIS to the list. The terrorist group had by then established a sex-slave trade in Iraq.  

Convinced that the United States was not taking seriously the sex slavery, beheadings, crucifixions, and other horrors ISIS was inflicting on Iraqi Yazidis and Christians, Frank Wolf worked with Chris Smith and the Knights of Columbus, with considerable support from the Religious Freedom Institute, to convince the Obama administration to declare ISIS’s actions a “genocide.” Smith held several hearings on the subject, including testimony by Wolf and Knights of Columbus head Carl Anderson, whose organization had produced a comprehensive study of the ISIS genocide. 

Wolf documented and publicized the mechanics of ISIS’s modern slave trade. In 2017, he led a fact-finding mission directly into dangerous regions of Northern Iraq—including Mosul and Mount Sinjar—to interview survivors and compile evidence on the thousands of women remaining in ISIS captivity. His resulting report, Northern Iraq 2017, was used in congressional testimonies to secure millions in USAID funding to assist the victims of ISIS.  

Wolf was highly effective in pressuring U.S. political leaders to be tough. One technique was to quote victims who criticized American pandering. Wolf told a reporter that  

Wei Jing-Shen, who spent years in prison and is referred to as the father of Chinese democracy and the Chinese Nelson Mandela, once told Chris Smith when American leaders pander to Chinese dictators, they beat dissidents more in the prison camps. By contrast, when American leaders are tough, predictable and transparent, “they beat us less.” 

Frank Wolf understood religious freedom to demand bipartisan fidelity. He believed the principles of the American Founding established a covenant, not just with the American people, but with the victims of persecution. He also believed the Obama administration was failing to honor that covenant, especially with minority Christians. 

In 2015, in his keynote speech at a Georgetown University event (sponsored by the Religious Freedom Project, precursor to the Religious Freedom Institute), Wolf drove the point home: 

President Reagan said the words in the Declaration of Independence and in the Constitution were a covenant we have made not just with those gathered in Philadelphia in 1776 and 1787 … but with the world—with the student protester in Tiananmen Square in 1989, and with the displaced Iraqi nun in 2015. But that covenant is now being shredded. 

Despite [the ISIS war on Christians], the administration has gone to great lengths to avoid saying that Christians were targeted for their faith by ISIS. When ISIS kidnapped and beheaded 21 Egyptian men on a beach in Libya, the New York Times … called them 21 “Coptic Christians.” The administration called them 21 “Egyptians.” After the killings at Garissa University, the administration would only refer to these Christian victims as “Kenyan citizens.” 

Wolf could turn his wrath on Republicans as well. When President George W. Bush and Republican congressional leaders sought to expand trade ties with China, Wolf broke ranks and criticized their policies as unwisely subordinating the freedom of Tibetan Buddhists, Uyghur Muslims, and Chinese Christians to commercial interests. 

Frank Wolf shared with his friend Chris Smith the virtue of telling the truth as he saw it, without fear. And like Smith, Wolf employed empirical evidence and reason in pressing his nation to honor human dignity. He was not afraid to employ Christian-based reasoning in ways that many considered “unconservative.”  

When the Ugandan government threatened to impose the death penalty on homosexuals, Wolf joined four other Republican members in writing to the Christian president of that country. Citing the “foundational Christian belief in the inherent dignity and worth of all men and women,” the congressmen said that “we believe this legislation, if enacted, would be antithetical to that premise.” Moreover, they continued, “the harshness of the proposals is … inconsistent with a Christian spirit of love and mercy.” 

As time went on, their arguments for religious freedom became national security arguments. In his Georgetown speech, Wolf put it this way: “[R]eligious freedom is the human rights issue of our time … not only because global persecution flies in the face of moral and natural law, but because religious freedom abroad is directly tied to our national security at home, as well as international stability.” 

More religious freedom, both had come to believe, would reduce religious persecution, terrorism, violence, and war. At the same time, it would increase political stability and foster economic growth, especially in nations genuinely struggling to develop stable democracies. 

The Ongoing Significance of the International Religious Freedom Act 

Smith and Wolf’s crowning achievement, born of their collaborative work and accumulated wisdom over the years, is a set of laws: the landmark 1998 International Religious Freedom Act (IRFA), and its revision eighteen years later, the Frank Wolf International Religious Freedom Act.  

The 1998 IRFA was the product of Frank Wolf’s moral and political vision. He sought a new and transformative religious freedom policy for the U.S. government, but he wanted to lock it into a law so popular that its substance would endure into the ages. It is difficult for those inured to (or contributors to) the bickering power struggles we currently call democracy to imagine such a nonpartisan transformation-by-statute today.  

To be sure, debates over what became IRFA were often quite partisan. President Clinton’s Secretary of State Madeleine Albright said the bill would create an illegitimate “hierarchy of rights” in which other human rights would be marginalized. Under Clinton’s democratic successors, it became clear that this foreshadowed the left’s “rights” claims of abortion, same-sex marriage, and gender fluidity.  

In the end, despite this and other disputes, IRFA passed unanimously in both houses of Congress. It established as the senior agent of transformation a new IRF Ambassador at Large in the State Department, who would “advance religious freedom” in U.S. foreign policy, issue an annual report, and advise the Secretary of State and Congress. It was a win for American democracy. 

But the passage of time revealed flaws. Many were resolved in the 2016 Frank Wolf IRFA, authored and driven by Chris Smith. That law, passed unanimously, strengthened the original IRFA, and demonstrated yet again the fruits of their friendship. Recounting a few of its key provisions helps make the point. The ambassador needed more authority, and Smith provided it. Now the ambassador was to report directly to the Secretary of State. The national security dimension of IRFA was not strong, but Smith fixed that, too. Foreign service officers did not have mandatory training on the meaning and reach of religious freedom. Now they do. 

The result was made clear when former Kansas senator Sam Brownback became the new IRF Ambassador. Suffice it to say that he brought U.S. policy closer to Frank Wolf’s vision than it had ever been. Armed with the 2016 Wolf amendments, Ambassador Brownback was able to move toward achieving the Founders’ vision as never before. 

A friendship begun in 1985, forged in shared Christian faith and encounters with human misery driven by animus toward religion, would become the ground on which a historic legacy would be built. And, I’m happy to add, Chris Smith and Frank Wolf are not done building it. As individuals, their accomplishments would prove immense by any metric. But the bonds of their friendship have enabled a legacy that far surpasses the sum of what they have done individually. In the years to come, may American leaders honor these architects of modern U.S. religious freedom policy by more fully pursuing their vision of religious freedom for everyone, everywhere.  

Image licensed via Adobe Stock.